The tremendous number of product types available to consumers at the retail level, e.g., in food and grocery, personal care, hardware and appliances, means that a retailer may have thousands of models or varieties of goods in inventory, each, of course, with a concomitant price. The result of this multitude of consumer products is that the control and consistency of pricing has assumed increasing importance, especially where retailing is highly competitive and price management is essential for a merchant to keep pace with competitors.
One area that has produced such a multitude of products and that has become a highly competitive selling environment is consumer appliances and electronics. Each type of product, e.g., a television set, is typically available from several different manufacturers, and each manufacturer typically produces several models of the same type product. The prices of products vary from manufacturer to manufacturer as well as within the same manufacturer's range of models, depending upon the particular specifications and features of each model within the product type. Moreover, each manufacturer sells its products through a large number of distributors and, ultimately, to retail stores, with the result that the pricing of the same product can differ from distributor to distributor, from retailer to retailer and from geographic market to geographic market. Even within a single merchant's inventory, price variations on an individual product occur, e.g., an advertised special versus the "regular" price.
To keep pace with competitors, a merchant may obtain pricing information by reviewing competitors' advertisements, printed or otherwise, by actual shopping of competitors and viewing of price tags in a competitor's store or outlet, or from a customer at the point of sale who claims that a certain product can be purchased from a competitor for a certain (i.e., lower) price. "Sale" prices are particularly problematic as such prices are typically only valid for a defined period, after which the "sale" price reverts to the "regular" price. If a merchant wishes to change prices in response to a competitor's price, usually special effort is required to change price tags at points of sale to meet or "beat" the competitor's price. The manual nature of the process does not permit prices to change frequently, such as once or twice per day. Such frequency is prohibitive, and thus, a merchant cannot respond daily to market price changes involving hundreds to thousands of products. Moreover, keeping track of the valid period for "sale" prices adds yet another layer of complexity. Further, if a competitor's pricing becomes known at the point of sale, the salesperson must determine if he or she is willing to sell the product for a lower or the same price, (i.e., in accordance with the merchant's pricing policy). In the latter situation, one customer may purchase a product at one price while the next customer at another price. Such a system leads to uncertainty in pricing.
Various pricing systems are known, although virtually none implement complex pricing policies. Many systems, especially in the stock brokerage area, will provide market pricing of stocks. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,313,560 issued to Maruoka et al. Maruoka et al. disclose a system for predicting the price fluctuations of stocks and bonds according to certain established rules which establish certain conditions. If certain conditions for price of a stock or bond are met, the system then displays a message to perform a certain activity, e.g., buy or sell. Other patents (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,452 issued to Bay, Jr., U.S. Pat. No. 5,339,392 issued to Risberg et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,032 issued to Trojan et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,270,922 issued to Higgins, U.S. Pat. No. 5,132,899 issued to Fox, U.S. Pat. No. 4,942,616 issued to Linstroth et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,486,853 issued to Parsons, and U.S. Pat. No. 1,927,702 issued to Foss) are directed to variations of stock quotation systems that provide a user with updated stock prices in a continually changing market of prices. While these systems can accommodate a continually changing price situation, the actual pricing, of course, is independent of the system, i.e., pricing is controlled by the stock market.
Other systems provide pricing as part of a broader system for sale of a product, for example, the sale of an insurance product. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,191,522 issued to Bosco et al. A few systems have addressed retail pricing; for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,992,940 issued to Dworkin. The Dworkin patent discloses a competitor price comparison feature in an automated purchasing system in which the user can compare prices of various vendors for the same product and select the "best price." Also, U.S. Pat. No. 5,172,314 issued to Poland et al. discloses a price updating system which includes electronic "price tags." The prices are updated by management, but no system or logic is disclosed for the pricing changes. Still other patents directed to pricing functions include U.S. Pat. No. 5,117,354 issued to Long et al. and Japanese Patent 58-161067. Further, others are directed to automated costing and selling systems (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,249,120 issued to Foley, U.S. Pat. No. 5,063,506 issued to Brockwell et al., U.S. Pat. No. 3,581,072 issued to Nymeyer). Also known are hand-held shoppers calculators (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,446,528 issued to Marmon, U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,638 issued to Hatta et al.) and bar-code type identification for automated pricing (U.S. Pat. No. 3,637,989 issued to Howard et al.). U.S. Pat. No. 5,212,644 issued to Frisch describes a system for changing the rental fees of lockers according to certain rules.
There appear to be some commercially available pricing systems. For example, DB:Solutions, Inc. of Kentfield, Calif., provides a software program which is advertised as a retail management system with a price-change management feature. Data Index, Inc. of Dallas, Tex., provides a software program which is said to target gross margins for products and reprice products as vendor or manufacturer prices changes. None of these systems provides a method for implementing pricing policies and integrating such policies with price comparisons among competitors.
Despite the known pricing and selling systems, there is needed a system that automatically and frequently prices and reprices a plurality of products in inventory, responsive to competitive market price changes, permits and tracks price exceptions, financing terms and premium offers associated with product price and sale price effective dates, but also provides point of sale assistance to buyers with price comparison among competitors on the product of interest or a substantially similar competitor product.